September 22 - Phoenix, AZ

And that's a rap! Thank you @fotc for another amazing tour...

And then there were the muffin police...

Me and Jermaine from Flight of the Conchords attempting to do a sexy pose

emira wrote:

...the stage was effectively set for the Flight of the Conchords reunion tour (preceded by a gloriously dated New Zealand tourism ad).

Seated and playing acoustic guitars, the New Zealand comedy duo of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement opened their part of the show with “Jenny,” a story song about a man and woman meeting in the park and the man not remembering the woman despite their having had a child together. An adopted child. As McKenzie, who played the role of Jenny, told Clement, “I can’t believe you don’t remember. It was a very difficult process.” The punchline, brilliantly played, is that she has the wrong guy.

Dryly referencing notes on the back of their guitars before every gratuitous mention of Phoenix, they joked about what constitutes a duo reuniting — including chance encounters in the grocery store. Then, Clement grabbed a bass for a rocker called “(Expletive) on the Ceiling,” which was followed by another two-character song, for which McKenzie’s image shrunk to half-size on the video monitor because he was playing the son in a father-and-son scenario.

It was after a bit about complimentary hotel muffins — meaning free of charge, not muffins that actually pay you compliments, they clarified — they played the first song of the night that was featured on one their studio albums, “Hurt Feelings,” in they play overly sensitive rappers. When Jemaine’s mother misses his birthday, in this particular performance, instead of “The day after my birthday is not my birthday, mum,” he said, “What do you mean you forgot about the time difference, mom? We live in the same house.” That one made for a seamless segue into “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros,” their other classic hip-hop song.

After going medieval on us with a bit of a madrigal, “The Summer of 1353,” which included a recorder solo from McKenzie, they stood up and got into the groove on “Inner City Pressure,” on which Clement followed the verse about a man who turns to prostitution so he can afford to take flute lessons by pretending to play a flute solo.

When someone shouted for “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor,” Clement explained the fundamental problem with this whole reunion tour idea. “We don’t know our new songs,” he said, “because we haven’t learned them. And we don’t know our old songs because we don’t remember them.”

Then, of course, they played “Too Many Dicks,” which included some truly hilarious dance moves and was probably the funniest performance of the set to that point. “The Most Beautiful Girl (in the Room),” with Clement back on bass, was another clear highlight. Then, after promising “one of our least popular songs,” they did “Song For Sally,” which somehow segued brilliantly into an over-the-top performance of “Creep” by Radiohead, McKenzie taking the “I’m a weirdo” portion of the lyrics to heart, adopting a bizarre voice and doing weird things to a woman in the front row with a microphone. When referred back to what he’d just done as sexually assaulting the woman, Clement cautioned, “I wouldn’t use the word sexually assaulting. For legal reasons.”

“Creep” was a tough act to follow but “Back on the Road” did a nice job of tying the set together, referring back to some previous bits, while serving as a theme song for the reunited duo, who sang, “We’d love to stay but we prefer to go.”